Help:Editing
This is a short tutorial on editing wikis at WikiHowTo. For more detail, please see the Wikipedia tutorial, on which this was based. :If you'd like to try out the editing information which is explained here, please use the sandbox to play. Registration and logging in You can read and edit pages without creating an account or logging in. To create an account (which is free), just click the " " link at the top right corner of any page. You only need a single login for all WikiHowTo. Creating an account is the only way to clearly attribute your work. Without a username, edits you make on any Wikicity will be attributed to the numerical IP address of your computer instead. Logging in therefore also increases your privacy, because your IP address will be hidden once you are logged in. There are many other benefits, such as user preferences, the ability to move pages, and a watchlist to keep an eye on selected pages. See "Why create an account?" on Wikipedia for some more arguments. See . Policies Do not submit copyrighted material without permission. The best content is usually written from either personal knowledge or through the synthesis of research from multiple sources. For a more detailed discussion of copyrights, see WikiHowTo copyrights. WikiHowTo encourages an atmosphere of friendliness and openness. Members of the community are expected to behave in a generally civil manner. You should always assume good faith on the part of other editors. See WikiHowTo policies and the terms of use for more information. Editing Like all wikis, you can edit any non-protected page. Your changes will be visible immediately. Just click the "'edit'" link that appears at the top of every page. Explain your edit in the "Summary" box between the edit window and the save and preview buttons. eg: "typo" or "added info on xyz". Use the button to check your edit and get the formatting right before saving. Remember to '''save' your preview before moving on. If you are , you can mark an edit as minor by checking the This is a minor edit box to let people know your edit is not something substantive. To try editing, open a new window and go to the WikiHowTo:Sandbox (which is an editing test area), and then click the "edit" link. Add something and click save. Formatting Most text formatting is usually done with wiki markup, so you don't have to learn . Bold and italics Bold and italics are added by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('): *''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on either side) *'bold' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on either side) *''bolded italics'' is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on either side) Headings and subheadings Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up your article by inserting a heading for each section. Headings can be created like this: * Top level heading (2 equals signs) * Subheading (3 equals signs) * Another level down (4 equals signs) * Another level down (5 equals signs) If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents (TOC) will be automatically generated. Try creating some headings in the sandbox and see the effect on the TOC. Indenting To indent text, place a colon (:) at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph. For example: This is aligned all the way to the left. ::This is indented slightly. :::This is indented more. is shown as: This is aligned all the way to the left. :This is indented slightly. ::This is indented more. Bullet points To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*). Similar to indentation, more asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation. A brief example: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Which is shown as: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Numbered lists You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol (#). Using more #s will affect the level of indenting. Example: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Shows up as: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Links Links are important on wikis to help readers navigate your site. Internal links You can extensively cross-reference wiki pages using internal links. You can add links to existing titles, and also to titles you think ought to exist in future. To make a link to another page on the same wiki, just put the title in double square brackets. For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Wikia page, it would be: :Wikia If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can add an alternative name by adding after the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards). For example, if you wanted to make a link to WikiHowTo, but wanted it to say "home page" you would write it as such: :View the home page... It would appear as: :View the home page... When you want to use the plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets. For example, you would write: :Add questions to the Wikicity for quizzes. It would appear as: :Add questions to the Wikicity for quizzes. Some WikiHowTo are available in multiple languages. To add a link in the sidebar from an article on the English Wikimac to the German version of the same article, type: :de:iPod "De" is the language code for German. The link will appear in the sidebar as "Deutsch" and link to The German WikiMac iPod article. This only works on wikis with multiple languages on different sites. See To link to another Wikicity, you can use its title followed by a colon and the article name, instead of using the full URL. For example, the creatures wiki home page is at Creatures:Main Page, which can be typed as :Creatures:Main Page :rather than as http://creatures.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page This style of link works for any wiki in the interwiki map, not just for WikiHowTo. See . External links If you want to link to a site outside of WikiHowTo, just type the full URL for the page you want to link to. :http://www.google.com/ It is often more useful to make the link display something other than the URL, so use one square bracket at each end, with the alternative title after the address separated by a space (not a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as Google search engine, just type: :Google search engine Redirects To redirect automatically from one page to another, type #REDIRECT and then put in brackets the name of the page to be redirected to. For example, you could redirect from "Cats" to "Cat". That way, anyone typing either version in the search box will automatically go to "Cat". Wiki variables and templates Use to see the current Wikicity. For instance, on this site prints out as . That and a few other templates are common to MediaWiki sites. Check the current list of all templates specific to wikicities. You can create templates. After you create the page Template:XXX, using the command will include that content in your current page. So, if you have something that needs to be included on many other pages, you might want to use a template. Most templates available on this Central Wikicity can be used on individual wikicities with just "wikicities:" prefixed to the name. See . Discussion pages Discussion or "talk" pages are for communicating with other Wikicitizens. To discuss any page, go to that page and then click the "discussion" tab at the top of the page. Add a new comment at the end, or below the comment you are replying to. Sign your comments by typing ~~~~ to insert your username and a timestamp. Use indenting to format your discussion. Standard practice is to indent your reply one level deeper than the comment you are replying to. Experiment by editing the talk page of the sandbox. User talk pages Everyone has a user talk page, on which other people can leave public messages. If someone has left you a message, you will see a note saying "You have new messages", with a link to your user talk page. You can reply on the user talk page of the person you're replying to or on your own talk page beneath the original message. If you reply on their talk page, they will receive notification of it. See also *More WikiHowTo help pages :* :* :* :* *Policies *Common mistakes *MediaWiki User's Guide *Wikipedia tutorial *An annotated Wikipedia article Sections, paragraphs, lists and lines Links and URLs Images Character formatting (see also: Chess symbols in Unicode) Tables Placement of the Table of Contents (TOC) At the current status of the wiki markup language, having at least four headers on a page triggers the TOC to appear in front of the first header (or after introductory sections). Putting __TOC__ anywhere forces the TOC to appear at that point (instead of just before the first header). Putting anywhere forces the TOC to disappear. See also compact TOC for alphabet and year headings. Keeping headings out of the Table of Contents If you want some subheadings to not appear in the Table of Contents, then make the following replacements. Replace Header 2 with Header 2 Replace Header 3 with Header 3 And so forth. For example, notice that the following header has the same font as the other subheaders to this "Tables" section, but the following header does not appear in the Table of Contents for this page. This header has the h4 font, but is NOT in the Table of Contents This effect is obtained by the following line of code. This header has the h4 font, but is NOT in the Table of Contents Tables There are two ways to build tables: *in special Wiki-markup (see m:Help:Table) *with the usual HTML elements: , , or . For the latter, and a discussion on when tables are appropriate, see Wikipedia:How to use tables. Variables (See also m:Help:Variable) NUMBEROFARTICLES is the number of pages in the main namespace which contain a link and are not a redirect, i.e. number of articles, stubs containing a link, and disambiguation pages. Templates The MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia has support for templates. This means standardized text chunks (such as boilerplate text) can be inserted into articles. For example, typing will appear as "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." when the page is saved. See Wikipedia:Template messages for the complete list. Other commonly used ones are: for disambiguation pages, for spoiler warnings and like an article stub but for a section. There are many subject-specific stubs e.g.: , and . For a complete list of stubs see Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs. Hiding the edit links Insert __NOEDITSECTION__ into the document to suppress the edit links that appear next to every section header. More information on editing wiki pages You may also want to learn about: * * Informal tips on contributing to Wikipedia * Editing tasks in general at the Wikipedia:Editing FAQ * Why not to rename pages boldly, at Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page * Preferred layout of your article, at Guide to Layout (see also Wikipedia:Boilerplate text) * Style conventions in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style * An article with annotations pointing out common Wikipedia style and layout issues, at Wikipedia:Annotated article * General policies in Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines * Wikipedia:Naming conventions for how to name articles themselves * If you are making an article about something that belongs to a group of objects (a city, an astronomical object, a chinese character...) check if there is a WikiProject on the group and try to follow its directions explicitly. * Finally, for a list of articles about editing Wikipedia consult Wikipedia:Style and How-to Directory. See also *m:Help:Formula *Mediawiki user's guide to editing *Wikipedia:MediaWiki -->